A watched pot

Finally, on Saturday 22nd July, we left the Briefing resort. Back at home in England, mum, having assessed my suitcase to be below amateur standard, had re-packed everything so that all the delicates and breakables were sufficiently padded, and my clothes appropriately ordered. Had she seen it now, after just two days at training, she might have had a small heart-attack. Even though I soon resorted to a circular repetition of shove, sit, and zip, I was still the last to be ready. Apologetically, I rolled my suitcase out of the bunk house and hauled it into the boot with the rest. There were two buses for us this time, one for the boys and one for the girls. Hot and sweaty and even tighter than before, we girls, cranked up the volume to AfroBeats, Fuse ODG, and DJ Khaled’s ‘I’m the One,’ and appeared to arrive at Sigatoka in no time.

Sigatoka (pronounced Singatoka) was a popular town close to our designated village. According to schedule it was here we were to spend the next few hours buying clothes and lunch, before driving to our village late afternoon. Somehow, waddling around in our Think Pacific shirts and sulus, we felt like celebrities. Pedestrians nodded at us and smiled: ‘Thank you for your volunteer,’ they said, as we passed in nervous clumps. Shops offered us discounts, saying: ‘For the volunteers, it’s this much…’ meaning that we were able to buy our Fijian dresses and shirts at a bargain price.

For lunch, we hauled up in a small Chinese restaurant above the shops, taking two round tables between us.

‘You alright there Andrew?’ I said. ‘You seem a little lost.’

‘Yeah, yeah. Fine, fine,’ he said, now aware that he was the only boy on the table. ‘Amazing how fast you girls switch topics though. I wasn’t prepared.’

‘So Andrew, how do submarines work?’ said Sarah, testing his Engineering expertise. Though it seemed like an impossible question, we all leaned in with awe as he tried best to explain how they ‘worked.’

‘And helicopters, how do they work?’ she asked when he was done.

‘Cor, blimey.’

Safe to say we managed to chat away three hours in this cool upper-floor restaurant, unable to actually set foot in our village until three o’clock. Outside our window was the terrific view of Sigatoka, where a long river with broken bridges divided the town and stretched out into the distance. Whilst reveling in the scenery, many of us took it in turns to go to the toilet, at which point CP revealed that she had already been struggling in that regard.

When at last, three o’clock arrived, our team leaders stood up and announced that we were leaving.

‘I’m actually really nervous now,’ said Hanna. ‘What if they don’t like me?’

Those nearest to her laughed. We waved it off, rejecting the notion with every fiber of our bodies, and yet, we were all thinking the same thing.

Back in the car park, we saw that our two travel vans had been replaced by a single red truck with a roof of yellow material not much thicker than a tent or bouncy castle. Inside were two wooden benches pressed up against either wall like pews, and it was there we sat, with our suitcases piled against our knees, for the tension-filled half an hour it took to reach the village.

As the truck slowed down, a sign on the side of a busy road indicated our turning: ‘Welcome to Batiri village,’ it said. The path from there was long and gravelly, crunching under our wheels and making us bounce involuntarily in our seats. Our stomachs made similar motions out of pure nerves. And the road was long. It took another ten minutes of driving through grass that rose tall in shades of yellow and green before we saw anything resembling village life. Had we not been tapping our feet and glancing at one another nervously, we might have seen, through the leaves, the coast in the far distance, where the sea hushed up against the island. Then finally houses and huts began to appear around us, children began popping out of doors and scuttling down the slopes as their parents looked on through windows. The truck tilted backwards as it carried us up the final, dirt-trodden hill , right into the heart of Batiri village…